Here's a question I see as alot more newbie-oriented than memory
functions, (m)allocs and the like. I recently had strong indications that
my HD was failing in my Ubuntu (Debian variant: or is Debian now an Ubuntu
variant?) machine. Pondering over what to do about saving data from that
machine and having to do the minimal amount of reinstallation, I came up
with the following, seemingly quite precarious plan: I would get a new HD,
do a fresh install of Ubuntu to it, then stick the old drive in as slave,
boot from a rescue CD, and copy the entire contents of the old drive to
the new one, replacing any files on the new one that have the same name as
those on the old one. Both the new install and the installation on the old
HD were the same Ubuntu release, btw. Yes, it looks like a real
kludge--not pretty, and maybe not even effective. It took a really long
time. The new Ubuntu install was over in about 20 minutes--the smoothest
part of the undertaking. Transferring the 70 GB of data from the old drive
to the new one took many hours. I was getting pretty poor drive access
rates for one thing, maybe due to the fact that the old drive is on its
way out. Then, I would occasionally get I/O errors on the old drive where
a file couldn't transfer. The more of those I got, the more sure I was
that this approach wouldn't work in the end. But when I finally finished
copying over everything, guess what? The system booted right up. It looked
and acted just like the system did when the old HD was functioning
properly. I have yet to run into any system glitches, but I've only been
running it for a couple of days now. On to my questions.
1) What sort of problems might I expect to crop up as I continue to use
this system? Doubtless some binaries or other types of system files were
among the ones that wouldn't transfer because of I/O errors. 2) What other
approach might I have taken to essentially preserve the existing
installation (both configuration and data) on a new HD?
Input will be appreciated.
Thanks, James
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